Meg Campbell 1908015 YR2 Art Blog

  Colour Experiments Following are my paint experiments to try and find an interesting and creative method of making a back drop to place art onto, rather than relying on a plain background. I wanted to try and create more texture in my work and feel a more colourful, abstract background could help me achieve this.  Firstly I started out with acrylic paint and pushed it around the page from a central point with only a sponge. I noticed however that when the paint was allowed to run freely it created a marbled effect that I found aesthetically more appealing than the smeared effect achieved by the sponge. For this I spread acrylic paint in the centre of the page directly from the bottle and repeatedly tipped the paper up and down in a singular direction to create a linear marbled effect. The way the colours shone through each other was interesting to me and created a softer effect than my previous experiment. For this one I used circular motions to tip the paint where I wanted ...

 Sympathetic Magic Pitt Rivers Museum - Oxford Links used to find and learn about the exhibit: https://romanmagic.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/magic-the-pitt-rivers-museum-a-reflection/ https://guerillaarchaeology.com/resources/witches-magic-and-medicine-pitt-rivers-museum/ https://romanmagic.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/magic-the-pitt-rivers-museum-a-reflection/ https://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/england/englishness-Object-biographies-details.html The sympathetic magic exhibition is a collection of artefacts from around the world used in rituals of magical or spiritual nature. The collection was put together by General Augustus Pitt Rivers and was donated to Oxford University. T he  Pitt Rivers Museum   is a free, public display space incorporating the 18,000 or so archaeology, anthropological and ethnographic objects donated to Oxford University by  General Augustus Pitt Rivers   and, subsequently, thoroughly expanded to over half a million individual objects....

  The "FunGirls" Moving forward with the "fungirls" I decided that colour was something I wanted to add, but I didn't want to make the colours too bright because I wanted to make the figures still seem whimsical and fantasy-esque. This lead me to using watercolour to keep a washed out effect as well as then defining key details using both fine liner pens and darkening certain areas with pencil. I did this to create more shadow and make them seem more real on the page. The made me feel a lot happier to look at, the colours added a level of happiness to the figures and made them seem more alive, rather than something that haunted my dreams.  I tried to use reference imagery from real mushrooms that exist in the world and my own photography to create a further link between myself and them. These have become a mild obsession of mine through my art and I really want to now experiment with them in more abstract areas to see their visual interaction and create textural...

The "FunGirls" The "fungirls" evolved from a play on words with fungi and girls after I drew women that appeared to me in a dream after I had been taking a large amount of mushroom pictures. In the dream I was lying in bed in the forest when mushrooms started to grow around me until they were approx. knee height. They then started sprouting feminine bodies and dancing around my bed. After a time they sank back into the forest floor and I jolted awake. From there I started drawing in the early hours of the morning with what I could find which happened to be grey scale pens. These area are a few examples of the work I created at this point. I made a point of highlighting the shadows and creating high contrast with the pens as well as finer detail in fine-liners. I found the results quite interesting and made for both beautiful and somehow uncanny work.  I also find these particular ones quite eerie to look at simply because they remind me of the dream that I had...

 Wunderkammer -  The Curio Cabinet https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/272 Wunderkammern , or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections—combining specimens, diagrams, and illustrations from many disciplines; marking the intersection of science and superstition; and drawing on natural, manmade, and artificial worlds—can be seen as the precursors to museums.  Interesting writing  work found: https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/wunderkammer-cabinet-of-curiosities Wunderkammer  is literally translated from German as a 'room of wonder'. In English it is usually referred to as a 'Cabinet of Curiosities'. Many  Wunderkammer  originated in royal treasuries, where the crown jewels and items of regalia were housed with other items of value for safekeeping. However, the idea of a  Wunderkammer  was fully born in the sixteenth ce...

 The Uncanny https://www.freud.org.uk/2019/09/18/the-uncanny/ One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud wrote his paper on ‘ The Uncanny ’ (Das Unheimliche). His theory was rooted in everyday experiences and the aesthetics of popular culture, related to what is frightening, repulsive and distressing. The paper tackles the horrific concepts of inanimate figures coming to life, severed limbs, ghosts, the image of the double figure(doppelgaengers) and lends itself to art, literature and cinema. In the second part, Freud begins to tackle people, things, self-expressions, experiences and situations that best represent the uncanny feeling. Freud’s paradigm example is the short story of  E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ , a tale that parents would tell their children to encourage them to go to sleep. The story goes that the child must be asleep for the Sandman to put sand in the child’s eyes – if they are not asleep, the Sandman will take out their eyes. The protagonist is a boy named...

  Myths, FolkLore and Fairy Tales When looking for inspiration I tried to be loose with how I found it. That being said, I drew a lot of inspiration from Folklore and mythology to create an interesting and built up world within my art that may or may not be seen from the surface. I love the idea of the whimsical and beautiful, as well as these things eventually being peoples downfall.  The Fae https://faefolk.weebly.com/lesson-1-1.html The fae folk or faeries or simply Fey, are creatures with magical ability. Now they don't all just spontaneously combust into magic, mind. Some have blatant supernatural powers (changelings, sirens, domovoy). Others are magical solely by their very existence (giants, trolls, ogres). But there is no denying the fact that most faeries are closely linked to the magical powers imbued by nature. That is perhaps why the elemental classifiers exist. Faeries are referred differently across the world. In Western Europe, they are "faeries," "the...